Robert Kegan - Immunity to change: how to overcome it and unlock potential in yourself and your organization

The Leadership for the Common Good series represents a partnership
between Harvard Business Press and the
Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Universitys
John F. Kennedy School of Government. Books in the series aim
to provoke conversations about the role of leaders in business,
government, and society, to enrich leadership theory and
enhance leadership practice, and to set the agenda for
defining effective leadership in the future.

Changing Minds

by Howard Gardner

Predictable Surprises

by Max H. Bazerman and
Michael D. Watkins

Bad Leadership

by Barbara Kellerman

Many Unhappy Returns

by Charles O. Rossotti

Leading Through Conflict

by Mark Gerzon

Senior Leadership Teams

by Ruth Wageman,
Debra A. Nunes, James A. Burruss,
and J. Richard Hackman.

Five Minds for the Future

by Howard Gardner

The Leaders We Need

by Michael Maccoby

Through the Labyrinth

by Alice H. Eagly and
Linda L. Carli

The Power of
Unreasonable People

by John Elkington and
Pamela Hartigan

Followership

by Barbara Kellerman

Copyright 2009 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation

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First eBook Edition: March 2009

ISBN: 978-1-4221-1736-1

For Bernard and Saralee Kegan

For my guys, Bill, Zach, and Max Lahey

CONTENTS

PART I
UNCOVERING A HIDDEN DYNAMIC IN
THE CHALLENGE OF CHANGE

ONE
Reconceiving the Challenge of Change

TWO
Uncovering the Immunity to Change

THREE
We Never Had a Language for It
Engaging the Emotional Life of the Organization

PART II
OVERCOMING THE IMMUNITY TO CHANGE IN
ORGANIZATIONS, INDIVIDUALS, AND TEAMS

FOUR
Overcoming the Groupwide Immunity to Change
A Collective Approach

FIVE
David Doesnt Delegate
Overcoming an Individuals Immunity to Change

SIX
Cathy Cant Contain Herself
Overcoming an Individuals Immunity to Change

SEVEN
The Case of Nascent Pharmaceuticals
Overcoming Individual Immunities to Help a Team Succeed

PART III
OVER TO YOU: DIAGNOSING AND OVERCOMING
IMMUNITIES IN YOURSELF AND YOUR ORGANIZATION

EIGHT
Unlocking Potential
Three Necessary Ingredients

NINE
Diagnosing Your Own Immunity to Change

TEN
Overcoming Your Immunity to Change

ELEVEN
Surfacing Your Collective Immunity to Change

CONCLUSION
Growing Your Own
How to Lead So People Develop

This book has literally taken us our whole professional lives to write. Advance reviewers say you will find here an entirely novel but thoroughly road-tested approach to bringing about significant improvements in individuals and groups in the workplace.

Well, its true that our road is well paved: The ideas and practices you will learn about here have been put to good use by a national railway in Europe, an international financial services company, one of Americas most admired technology companies, the leadership of a statewide child welfare agency, superintendents and their principals in several U.S. school districts, senior partners in the worlds leading international strategy consulting firm, and the fastest-growing labor union in America.

But it has also been a winding road, and to tell the truth, we didnt set out originally to work on the problem we are now getting credit for solvinghow to close the gap between what people genuinely intend to do and what they are actually able to bring about. Twenty-five years ago we would have been of little use to these organizations. Though we knew then we were on a trail worth a lifetime of exploration, we had no idea or plan that it would bring us to leaders and their teams in public and private sectors in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

We began as academic psychologists researching the development of mindsets and mental complexity in adulthood. With one of us (Kegan) taking the lead in the development of a new theory, and the other (Lahey) taking the lead in developing the research method and assessment procedures to test and refine it, we proceeded, in the 1980s, to uncover something that has been fascinating usand fellow researchers and practitioners all over the worldever since.

We discovered the possibility of life after adolescence! Despite the popularand, at that time, even scientificbelief that our minds, like our bodies, dont get any taller after adolescence, we found that some of our adult research subjects were able to evolve whole patterns of increasingly complex and agile ways of apprehending the world.

While few attained the most advanced growth patterns our investigations revealed, it was apparent through longitudinal research (carefully assessing and reassessing the same people over many years) that when people did evolve it was always in the same sequence. Each new mental plateau gradually overcame the systematic limitations of the prior one. Further research eventually demonstrated that each qualitative leap forward enhances not only peoples ability to see (into themselves and their world) but to act more effectively as well. (You will learn more about these mental plateaus in the first chapter of this book.)

But we also saw that many people did not evolve a whole new mental system after adolescence, and if they moved at all it wasnt far. Since we have always been educators at heart (and have spent our university lives not in a school of management, but a school of education), we wanted to know whether one could do anything to support these shifts in the expansiveness and complexity of our mindsets. Were such advances just a matter of fate and random variation, completely out of our hands? Or could people actually be helped to grow? This took us further down our road, throughout the 1990s, and led us to a second discovery.

We had been studying the evolution of mental development from the outside, as it were, seeking to describe the structure of each way of meaning-making, why it created the reality it did, what changed in a structure when it evolved. But now, without our quite realizing it, we were finding our way into the inner dynamics, in particular a sort of master motive that keeps us on our current plateau. We uncovered a phenomenon we call the immunity to change, a heretofore hidden dynamic that actively (and brilliantly) prevents us from changing because of its devotion to preserving our existing way of making meaning.

We first introduced readers to the concept of immunity to change in our 2001 book, How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work. There we presented a deceptively simple processdistilled and refined over many yearsby which people can uncover the hidden motivations and beliefs that prevent them from making the very changes they know they should make and very much want to make (whether the goal is being more courageous in my communications or losing weight).

The reception to that book has been enormously gratifying, as it has been to watch what happens when we personally guide people (now several thousand a year) through this process (as we will guide you, if you wish, in chapter 9). They repeatedly say things like, I never saw that coming! and I got more out of that in three hours than three years in therapy! But the truth is, what people are raving about is the power and clarity of a new